Game of Kings Page 6

  In those early days, in order to raise money, the team sold refrigerator magnets and miniature chess sets and lapel pins and sweatshirts and T-shirts and homemade chocolate valentine lollipops. They solicited donations from teachers and administrators. The school didn’t have any money to contribute; the Board of Education gave on occasion, when it could, without any guarantees. Murrow was a school without sports teams, after all, and a budget that would have normally gone toward football helmets and basketball uniforms was already apportioned toward other things.

  So in 1993, when the Murrow administration and the Board of Ed told Weiss it simply didn’t have the money to send the team to Dallas to defend its title, he sprang into action. He did what he’s since learned to do quite well: He alerted the media. On December 30, 1992, Newsday ran a story headlined “Pawns of the Budget,” in which Weiss responded to a board member’s comment that “there are too many needs in the classroom” with this: “They have money for condoms and other things but not for something the kids could really use.”

  Three weeks later, when the Times ran a story of its own, the money had come through, thanks to a “last-minute budget surplus.” And that team, comprised entirely of immigrants from what had been the Soviet Union, led by individual national champion Alex Sidelnikov and Latvian Anna Khan, a future U.S. women’s champion, won again. The margin of victory was four points, large enough that all of its top competitors could have sat out the final round and Murrow still would have won first place.

  “So,” asks a girl named Elizabeth. “How do we get on the actual chess team?”

  “Well,” Weiss says, “I pick people. If you want to go to the local tournaments around here and go to the city championships, I might just let you go. They only take the top four scorers, so you’re not going to hurt the team if you don’t play well.”

  “What about the nationals?” someone asks.

  “That’s a little different,” Weiss says. “The state tournament is in Saratoga—that’s upstate—at the end of February. The nationals are four days in April in Tennessee. If you show me you’re really interested, if you play in tournaments and show up every week, I might be able to take you.”

  “Is there a limit?”

  “No limit at all,” Weiss says. “I’ve taken as many as twenty-three people to nationals. Last year, only eight went. So it all depends.”

  When the question-and-answer session is complete, they get down to playing. The games are still sloppy and haphazard, devoid of precision and depth of thought. Queens are blundered away. Rooks become trapped in corners. No one seems to care. They switch partners and try it again. The four sophomores, Rex and Robert and Adalberto and Renwick, are here again, playing against each other in round-robin fashion. None of them had played chess before last week; they heard about the team, about its history, about the championships, and they showed up together. They figured they had nothing to lose.

  After failing to compete in the state tournament due to a lack of funds, Murrow won its third straight national championship in Dear-born, Michigan, in 1994, behind an immigrant from Uzbekistan, Alex Kaliksteyn, who won all seven of his matches. This time, the margin of victory was three and a half points. It was the first time any school had won both the team and individual championships two years in a row. “The word dynasty does not completely describe Edward R. Murrow High School’s preeminence in high school chess,” wrote longtime tournament organizer Steve Immitt in an article detailing the history of the high-school nationals. “Complete hegemony is more accurate.”

  The newspapers had caught on by now, and Weiss had caught on to the engine that drove the newspapers. A nationally recognized high-school chess team in need of funds, supported by a local congressman and ignored by the board of education, was optimal fodder for a tabloid-driven city in search of David-versus-Goliath stories. At times, forced publicity was the team’s only hope. And Weiss was nothing if not persistent. A NewYork Post story in early March of 1994 was headlined “HS Team: Send a check, mate,” and detailed how Murrow, aided in its fund-raising efforts by City Councilman Dan Feldman, was still $2,000 short of the $6,554 it needed to make it to Detroit. Eventually, a Russian television network donated additional monies, and in early May, the Post ran another story, headlined “Check it out: B’klyn HS team tops in chess.”

  Murrow didn’t make it to Chicago for the nationals after finishing second to Stuyvesant for the city championship in 1995; the money didn’t come through, and Dalton won both the team and individual titles at the nationals. And in 1996, Weiss once again found himself in a position of begging, pleading, appealing to Newsday after the team wound up more than $2,300 short of the money needed to compete at the state tournament in White Plains and the national tournament in Somerset, New Jersey. “We’re having a tough time with this,” he said. “This team has been a source of pride for our school, for the city.”

  This time, the money did come through, although Murrow finished eighth, far behind Philadelphia’s Julia Masterman High School, led by a young master named Greg Shahade. Murrow’s hegemonic run had come to an end. And yet Weiss kept at it, and in 1997, the owner of a Long Island City construction company donated $7,000 after reading a story in the Daily News, telling the paper he “didn’t think it was fair” that Murrow didn’t get to go to nationals. They finished twelfth that year at the first-ever “Supernationals,” a quadrennial gathering in which the elementary, junior-high, and high-school nationals are melded into one event; in the two years after that, 1998 and 1999, Murrow failed to win a city or state championship, and came in fortieth and twenty-third at the nationals. And yet Weiss kept on appealing for funds, and kept on building up his team for a future he could never quite guarantee.

  It could be argued that nothing has served as a more potent advertisement for Murrow High School in the past two decades than Eliot Weiss and his one-man publicity machine, which has produced countless headlines not just in the Post and the Times and the Daily News and Newsday, but in community newspapers read by parents of prospective students, papers like the Bay News and Brooklyn Skyline and the Kings Courier. It took Bruckner a few years to determine the value of such publicity, but once he did, he encouraged Weiss’s experiment. A certain percentage of incoming students are chosen by the school itself; if those students happen to be slightly below par academically, but also happen to have USCF chess ratings in excess of 1500, or 1700, or 1900, then, well, isn’t this indicative of a certain unfulfilled potential? Doesn’t that make them, as Diane Ravitch once wrote, the perfect fit for a school whose students “have been persuaded that Murrow is a very special school and they are very special students?”

  This may sound ridiculous, like the genesis of a comedy sketch: a high-school chess coach engaging in recruiting. And yet there is no other way to characterize it. Weiss finds out about prospective students at tournaments like the Right Move, and he pitches them on the merits of Murrow. They learn about him. He learns about them. There is nothing untoward about it. There are no grand promises, no guarantees of playing time or special treatment as there might be in football or basketball. All Weiss is doing is attempting to improve the makeup of his traveling team, which, in turn, improves the reputation of his school. Each national championship Murrow wins earns a place in the school’s promotional material. Each article about Murrow’s latest title spreads the gospel of the school across the five boroughs and beyond.

  A school like Abraham Lincoln High, in Brooklyn’s Coney Island neighborhood, has earned a reputation as a basketball powerhouse, and yet this does nothing to enhance its standing academically. But given Murrow’s mission statement, given the purpose ascribed to it by Saul Bruckner himself, there could be no more well-suited public face than a formidable chess team. With each championship, with each headline, Murrow becomes known as a school populated by quirky geniuses, a school that embodies all the stereotypes of a sport whose most celebrated American practitioner was both brilliant and inscrutable.

  Ale
x Lenderman (left)

  FIVE

  A GAME UNLIKE ANY OTHER

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1972, BOBBY FISCHER PLAYED BORIS SPASSKY IN A series of games for the world chess championship in Reykjavík, Iceland, and for the first time in the history of the United States, the game became part of the zeitgeist. It became a televised drama and a geopolitical metaphor and a cult of personality centered around a twenty-nine-year-old boy from Brooklyn who had neither the tact nor the stability to deal with this sudden burst of fame, whose name would become shorthand for a brand of mania that is unique to his sport.

  Bobby Fischer was raised by his mother in a small apartment near Prospect Park, a short distance from where, two years after Fischer-Spassky, the experiment in secondary education known as Edward R. Murrow High School would open its doors. Fischer had become terminally obsessed with the game at the age of six, and entered his first tournament at age nine, and when he wasn’t at home, buried in chess literature, he spent most of his time at one oasis or another, at the Marshall Club in Greenwich Village or the Manhattan Chess Club on West Forty-sixth Street or at the outdoor tables in Washington Square Park. This evolution took place despite the growing dismay of his mother, who consulted experts and pleaded with psychiatrists and eventually gave up and left her boy to fend for himself in their Brooklyn apartment, surrounded by his books and his boards.

  By the time Fischer was fourteen, when he was on the verge of both dropping out of Erasmus Hall High School and winning his first U.S. Championship, he was well known in the community as a freak of nature, as the most talented young player to have graced the streets of New York City since a nine-year-old Polish boy named Samuel Reshevsky had toured the United States in 1920. In 1956, while playing at the Lessing J. Rosenwald Tournament at the Manhattan Chess Club, Fischer sacrificed his queen on the seventeenth move, a tactic so stunning and innovative that a magazine called Chess Review referred to it as “the game of the century.”

  “He admitted that in his younger days he cried whenever he lost at chess and sometimes he remained despondent for days,” wrote author Gay Talese, then of The NewYork Times, in June of 1957, in a profile headlined “Another Child Prodigy Stirs Chess World.” “But he does not cry any more, possibly because he does not lose often these days, or maybe he is just getting old.”

  In chess, a sport rife with prodigies, “getting old” is often measured by the same accelerated lifespan we associate with gymnasts and tennis players. The vast majority of talented young players peak at a certain age, and then forsake the diminishing returns of a nuanced study of the Nimzo-Indian Defense for certain outside obsessions brought on by puberty. But Fischer was the exception to every rule. He never displayed much of an interest in women. He was a savant, with an IQ reportedly in the 180s, and even if there was no real living to be made by a chess player in the United States, Fischer had little interest in making a living in anything beyond chess. “Though school tests have shown him to have generally superior intelligence, he does no better than average in his studies, displaying little interest in most of the subjects taught and being restless in class,” a NewYorker correspondent reported in September 1957. “His teachers are amazed when they hear of his chess victories—not so much at his mental powers that they hadn’t suspected as at his being able to sit still for the five hours a tournament game may last. ‘In my class, Bobby couldn’t sit still for five minutes,’ one of them says.”

  And yet not since a player named Paul Morphy emerged from New Orleans in the mid-1800s had America produced a player with this sort of talent, and the fact that, according to legend, Morphy wound up dead in a bathtub at age forty-seven, surrounded by women’s shoes, hardly figured into the calculus. Fischer got better and better, and fell deeper and deeper into himself and his ego. (“. . . a highly emotional, tense combatant whose cockiness often disconcerts the older masters,” Talese wrote of the fourteen-year-old Fischer.) All of which led up to 1972, when, in the preliminary matches leading up to the World Championships, Fischer dominated some of the best players in the world, winning six straight games from formidable Russian grandmaster (and classical pianist) Mark Taimanov and six more in a row from a Dane named Bent Larsen on his way to earning the right to face Spassky. In a sport in which draws are commonplace and losses are inevitable, this type of feat was unprecedented, the chess equivalent of DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hit streak.

  Fischer’s opponent, Boris Vasilievich Spassky, was from Leningrad, and had been nurtured by the infrastructure of a country where superiority in chess was viewed as a verification that the Communist system worked. He was attended to in Iceland by a small army of advisors and government overseers. Fischer was essentially on his own. He made absurd demands throughout the match, continually threatening to pull out altogether if they weren’t met, until finally Henry Kissinger urged him to continue playing in service of his country. Fischer ordered cameras to be barred from the room, along with children, and stiletto-heeled shoes, and all spectators sitting in the first seven rows. His behavior was theatrical and it was absurdist and damned if it wasn’t fascinating. He demanded a large purse for his appearance, and at the last minute, he decided it wasn’t enough and demanded more. “I am only interested in chess and money,” he told an Italian newspaper.

  The Fischer-Spassky games (Fischer wound up winning, 12 1/2 to 8 1/2) became front-page news in America. They were broadcast on public television and moderated by national master Shelby Lyman and another young and shaggy-haired chess master from Brooklyn named Bruce Pandolfini, who at the time was working at the Strand, a used bookstore in Manhattan. “That summer of 1972, chess became monumental, a game unlike any other,” wrote Fred Waitzkin in his memoir, Searching for Bobby Fischer, “and everyone wanted to play. . . . Mothers pulled their sons out of Little League and ferried them to chess lessons.”

  Chess clubs sprouted throughout New York City; youth programs proliferated. Fischer was on the covers of Sports Illustrated, Life, Time, and Newsweek, and he appeared on talk shows with Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson. “The chess epidemic infected all generations and classes: the old played the young, business suits looked across the board at blue collars,” wrote David Edmonds and John Eidinow in their book about the match, Bobby Fischer Goes to War. “African Americans took up the game in increasing numbers. . . . Kibitzing decamped from the obscure club to the park bench. . . .” Pandolfini himself became a minor celebrity—a few days after the broadcast began, he was walking on Sixth Avenue when a gorgeous woman leapt out of a limousine and shouted, “Bruce! Bruce Pandolfini! Oh, wow!”—and eventually he parlayed it into a career as a renowned instructor and a prolific writer of instructional chess books, of which more than a million copies have sold.

  “Chess has its own mythology—about the game’s origins, its proponents and players, and even its very purpose,” Pandolfini writes in the aptly titled Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide to Chess. “But no one really knows who invented chess.”

  The legends have persisted over centuries, like the one about Sissa, the Brahmin philosopher who supposedly created the game to teach a despotic king that he couldn’t rule without the support of all of his subjects, or the one about the wise men in a Persian kingdom who invented the game to placate a Persian queen, to re-create the battle that had killed her son and show that he had died honorably. Stories like these, apocryphal though they may be, seem to support the widely held theory that the game’s origins can be traced back to fifth- or sixth-century India (although there are certain historians who would argue for China), to a primitive ancestor called chaturanga, meaning “army composed of four members”: elephants (bishops), horses (knights), chariots (rooks), and foot soldiers (pawns). Its popularity spread westward to Persia and Arabia and eventually to Europe around the year 1000, imported from the northern shore of Africa, most notably into Spain by the Moors. At the same time the game spread eastward into Asia, spawning numerous variations, and eventually into Russia (perhaps via Genghis Khan and his Mongols, when t
hey overran the country in the twelfth century, but more likely sooner than that). In Czarist Russia, the game was banned by the Christian church, but this only inflamed its popularity, both among the commoners and among royalty, including Ivan the Terrible, who supposedly died in front of a chessboard. In time, chess became a unifying force: “Russia, by the early eighteenth century, was a kind of focal center, a boiling stew of chess ingredients from all over the world,” wrote author J. C. Hallman. Along came Mikhail Chigorin, who played for the world championship twice in the late 1800s, and who became the first Russian to devote his life to chess. After the Bolshevik Revolution, chess continued to anchor this fledgling culture. It became a method for appeasing the masses in their leisure time, and for establishing and expanding the intellectual culture of the governmental system. Chess came under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Council for Physical Culture; the game was taught in schools to all children who achieved good grades. By the 1970s, by the time of Spassky’s rise to prominence in the midst of the cold war, accomplishment in chess in the Soviet Union became an imperative; to lose, and especially to lose to an American who had grown up without any proper teaching, without any governmental infrastructure, was simply unfathomable.